Season 29 Compendium for Diablo 3

This content hub article will guide you through the most important changes in the patch and will discuss the new seasonal theme, the Diabolical Fissures.

Patch 2.7.6 will be applied to Non-Seasonal servers on September 13th, and Season 29 will start on September 15th 2023 at 5pm PDT (NA servers), 5pm CEST (EU servers), and 5pm KST (Asian servers).

The Conquests for the Seasonal Journey in Season 29 are Avarice, Years of War, Masters of the Universe, Sprinter, and The Thrill (or Avaritia, Dynasty, Masters of Sets, Speed Racer, and Super Human respectively in Hardcore). With their varying difficulty taken into consideration, we advise you to complete Avarice, The Thrill, and either Years of War (if you plan on having more than 1 character) or Sprinter (if you plan on sticking to a main).

It should be noted that the 'Mastermind' challenge has been removed from the Champion portion of the Seasonal Journey. This means you no longer need to master a Set Dungeon, arguably the most annoying step in the journeying process, and you should most likely skip Masters of the Universe Conquest from now on.

The Haedrig's Gifts for Season 29 are:

• Barbarian: Might of the Earth
• Crusader: Thorns of the Invoker
• Demon Hunter: The Shadow's Mantle
• Monk: Monkey King's Garb
• Necromancer: Grace of Inarius
• Witch Doctor: Raiment of the Jade Harvester
• Wizard: Firebird's Finery

If you plan on devoting little time to Season 29 and want to knock out the Seasonal Journey the fastest way possible, we recommend playing a Wizard or a Demon Hunter. The Wizard's Firebird's Finery has a damage-related power baked into the set as early as the 2-piece and gets a powerful mobility tool with the Teleport reset through the 4-piece bonus. The same applies to The Shadow's Mantle set for Demon Hunters, which propels the damage of several resource spenders with the 2-piece bonus and nets you massive utility with the 4-piece.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Necromancers have it worst with the anemic Grace of Inarius set and will have to luck out on early legendary drops or crafts to compensate and stabilize their performance.

Nevertheless, all seven classes get reasonably competent sets that can easily carry your early seasonal progression, so unless you're hard-pressed for time, you can safely start on any character you desire.

Solo Self-Found (abbreviated to 'SSF') is a new mode that is permanently added to the game. This mode is selected at character creation and is irreversible; with SSF on, the character opts out of any group-related activities - most notably group Greater Rifts and group Bounties, which allow players with dedicated grinding parties to vastly out-scale solitary players.

Season 29's focus on competitiveness is further reinforced by the season-specific Paragon cap of 800 levels. Additionally, the Paragon system has been rebalanced to allow the allocation of the full 200 points into any stat in a given category instead of the usual 50-point cap per stat. This lets you better fine-tune your character in the endgame, while simultaneously allowing for more leniency on gear rolls earlier on. The potential to get 40% Cooldown Reduction, 40% Resource Cost Reduction, or 200% Area Damage from Paragon points alone breaks up some of the harsher stat roll breakpoints on items and even dethrones some dominant legendary powers.

Even more interestingly, the long-standing Movement Speed cap of 25% is now gone, allowing you to surpass that with a combination of Paragon Points and gear - but on the flip side, getting 25% Movement Speed from Paragons now requires all 200 points to be spent on that particular stat! This removes main stat-stacking that the Paragon system was notorious for and re-focuses the game on farming for exceptionally well-rolled items.

It should be noted that Patch 2.7.6 also brings a rework to how Area Damage is coded in Diablo 3, removing most, if not all, of the lag associated with Area Damage stacking.

The 'Visions of Enmity' mentioned in the Season's title are manifest in the Diabolical Fissures - brightly lit purple/teal portals that are randomly spawned in the open world (meaning, outside of Rifts) while you're doing Bounties.

Diabolical Fissure portals lead to a quick, descending chain of compact, heavily randomized levels (both in terms of layout and enemy composition) that are well worth visiting, as they reward with a generous lump of Bounty materials upon completion.

From a theorycrafting perspective, there are scarcely things of note about Visions of Enmity; they are primarily a fun little addition to spruce up open world gameplay. You can check out our dedicated Visions of Enmity article below:

For S29, the newly added Enervating and Necrotic elite affixes can only be encountered in the Diabolical Fissures. While they can seem intimidating - with the heavy penalties on Movement Speed and CDR on Enervating and the percentage-based ticking DoT on Necrotic - the limited challenges of regular Torment difficulties allow you to considerably outscale the power of any elite affix, including the newcomers.

There's also a variety of community-led changes in Patch 2.7.6, most notably the alterations to Orek's Dream that make the encounter of this 1-in-a-100 top-tier rift (in terms of layout, monster composition, and the various factors that make a GR desirable for Leaderboard pushing) even more dream-like. The competitive focus of Season 29 makes the encounter of Orek's Dream during pushes even more desirable.

While the more significant "final" big balancing patch is reserved for Season 30, where the Altar of Rites will be making its revamped comeback, Season 29 also gets a modest number of class balancing changes. The most notable changes concern Crusaders and Witch Doctors.

Crusaders get a decent buff to the Blessed Shield "Captain America" build with the removal of per-enemy stacks of Akkhan's Leniency (the item now stacks up to 100 and is purely based on attacks, not the size of the mob pull), and Vigilante Belt gets a legendary bonus dedicated to the Fist of the Heavens build - a toned-down version of the S27 Sanctified power, but enough to reinstate the reign of the FotH spec for Crusader speed farming.

Witch Doctors receive what is practically a new build, considering the near-forgotten status of the Manajuma's Way set. The meme status Cluckeye bow is now a Witch Doctor exclusive legendary, and it greatly amplifies Hex Angry Chicken damage along with turning all your pets into, well, Angry Chickens. The Angry Chicken damage multiplier of the Manajuma set is significantly bolstered, and it also receives a damage reduction bonus worthy of an endgame-pushing set. With these factors combined, a Witch Doctor sporting the Arachyr and Manajuma sets is a top contender for the WD leaderboards!